Lovers, the ghost and machine
by Improbabile
Summary: Bruce is an android built by Thomas Wayne, a machine that resembles perfectly a human being. Bruce thinks he knows what is possible and what is not, but he realizes maybe the disembodied being calling himself "Joker" isn't in the real things list. Only he is Capeless!AU Android!Bruce Ghost!Joker eventual Bruce/Joker
1. Chapter 1

**"Author's" note:**so, I wrote this for the BatJokes Multichoice and planned to make it a one-shot. It didn't work. This is the first time this happens to me I think, it's weird, I don't want this. Anyway, this is kind of a prologue, the Batman/Joker action will come in later chapters. Don't ask when. Don't ask at all. You don't want to know what goes on in my mind. It's weird, dangerous and infective and you don't want to end up like me. I hope you enjoy this

**Disclaimer:** not mine

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Bruce was standing by the window, admiring the beautiful sunset. It was a cloudless evening, and the sun was painting the sky in shades of red and orange. Bruce wasn't an expert in poetry, but he supposed the moment was really poetic. And he certainly wasn't blind, nor totally insensitive to beauty. His arms were crossed on his chest, and he wondered if he could go to his room and spend the time reading something. He was tempted to, Alfred had given him a new book that looked interesting, but Thomas had said something about the possibility of needing him later.

An hour after the sun had completely disappeared, an alarm set off. It was a loud, piercing noise, and Bruce knew what it meant. He turned around and ran towards the south-east part of the manor. He opened the secret passage Thomas had built to get to the foundations, and as soon as he did thick black smoke and heat came out of it. Bruce got on the lift, and one second before he could close it behind himself Alfred joined him.

«You shouldn't come down there» Bruce said «It's dangerous»

«It is also for you» Alfred replied.

In the cave it was chaos. Alfred started coughing and covered his noise, the smoke rising from the chemical products on flames making his throat burn. Bruce didn't have this problem, though the heat was more than he could bear. He looked around and saw Thomas, standing on a table. He was surrounded by fire. Apparently, something had gone wrong with his experiments. Bruce was about to step out of the lift to help Thomas, when a can of something exploded near the man. Thomas screamed in pain as his body was set on fire.

«Father-» a flame hit Bruce's arm, the burning sensation traveling through him and making him stop mid-sentence. Before he could do anything, Alfred started up the lift and they were back in the upper rooms, the door closing behind them. The two sat on the ground right out of the lift, Alfred coughing and with tears running down his face, Bruce with his unharmed hand clenched around his burnt forearm.

«Are you-» Alfred couldn't finish his phrase as the coughing resumed.

«...ok? More or less» Bruce said. He thumped his head against the wall behind himself. Both him and Alfred had warned Thomas many times about the dangers of having all those flammable substances near each other, but he had never listened to them. Now the security system would contain the fire and eventually it would all burn down, but that wasn't the problem. As the alarm kept screaming, Bruce realized that Alfred's tears were not only of physical pain, that a lab could be rebuilded, but Thomas Wayne was lost forever.

Bruce wondered how people usually feel after seeing their father burn alive. Far worse than he did, that's for sure. Many would blame him for being so cold, but he simply couldn't feel any pain that wasn't due to his wound. He looked down and removed his hand from his wound, seeing the plastic that resembled skin melted and revealing the wires that ran underneath it.

Bruce made sure that Alfred was physically fine and sent the butler to sleep. The old man didn't complain at all, not when Bruce checked on him and made him breathe some fresh air in the garden, not when he declared that he should go to bed and get some rest. Bruce should take him at the hospital tomorrow, to be sure he was totally fine, but tonight he decided it was better to let the man have some piece. Thomas had not only been his employer, but also his friend, it was only normal that Alfred was emotionally drained.

Only when the butler was in his room, Bruce walked to his. Most of the tools were down in the cave, but he still kept something in his room, just in case he needed to repaired and the cave was inaccessible. Like now. He sat under the light and examined his wound.

Repairing his skin would be simple, but the wires were another thing. Half of them were burnt, and replacing them was a work of huge precision. He could do it alone, but it would be better to have Alfred help him with it when the man was in the conditions to. Luckily those were only the outer wires, who served the only purpose of giving him sensorial input. The important ones, those needed for the correct movement of his hand, were protected by a layer of a metal alloy, which had a non-conducting gel underneath. Bruce grabbed his tools and resigned himself to losing sensibility on his left hand for the foreseeable future.

Bruce was the one who recuperated Thomas's body, early in the morning. The fire had died quickly, after burning all the chemicals and a great number of the bats who lived in the cave. The air was still full of fumes and some zones were still burning, but Bruce could go through the cave safely enough. Bruce's smell sensors told him the place stink of chemicals and burnt flesh.

Thomas - or what remained of him - was lying near the spot the flames had caught him. The body was all blackened bones and wrinkled skin. Bruce took him in his arms and carried him out. Alfred was standing in the room when he walked out of the lift - the butler's eyes were red, due to the crying and the lack of sleep, and he was shaking lightly, but it didn't look like he was about to have a break down. He swallowed when he took sight of what remained of Thomas.

«Why didn't you listen to me Thomas?» he whispered. Bruce could have told him that it was useless to speak with a dead body, but he was sure it wasn't appropriate. He wished to say he was sad too, but that would be a lie and the both knew it.

Bruce had come home from the funeral as soon as he could. While he could fake sadness, someone would eventually notice that his lack of tears wasn't because he had already cried them all, but rather because he didn't have any to cry. Thomas hadn't given him tear ducts when he had built him, even for a genius like him giving an android a way to cry had proved too difficult. Now, of course, Bruce would likely never have any, since the only man who had managed to build a machine so closely resembling a human was lying dead besides his late wife.

Martha Wayne had died a couple decades ago. A man shot her while she and Thomas were coming out of a theatre. Thomas was wounded too, but it was a rather light injury. Instead Martha had died in a matter of seconds. The autopsy had revealed that she was pregnant of about three months when it happened.

From that day, Thomas became obsessed with death. He would perform experiments and create theories about how maybe a person could be brought back to life, earning from his colleagues a series of nicknames, the kinder of which was "Frankenstein". But while they pitied him, or mocked him, Thomas became one of the biggest experts in medicine and anatomy ever.

Thomas was not only a brilliant physician, but also an engineer and he knew a lot also in other sciences. After many tentatives, he had eventually managed to create a perfectly working android with a mind of his own, who at first went by the code BTM14, and then by Bruce. Thomas had created him because, he said, knowing how to build something that so closely resembled a human from wires, plastic, metal and absolutely no organic matter brought him closer to understanding how a real human mind could be recreated from dead bodies.

No one knew what Bruce really was - Thomas had presented him like a distant relative who decided to come and live with him. Only Alfred was informed of Bruce's real nature, but that was because the butler was already aware of all of Thomas's experiments. To the man credit, after a couple of weeks Alfred had already adapted to Bruce's presence and regarded him like he would have done were Bruce Thomas's son. Technically, he was, and Thomas had also programmed him to call him "father", at least when there was no one else around. And while Thomas thought him all he knew about science and life, Alfred patiently explained him all there was to know about the world and these mysterious things humans called "emotions".

Bruce knew perfectly why he didn't have any. In the first place, emotions were a matter of hormones and chemical substances that travel from one cell of a living being to another. Bruce worked on nothing but electric impulses, because designing him to be a cyborg rather than an android would have been to hard at the time. He was basically like a human without hormones - perfectly capable of thinking, learning, moving, remembering, but unable of having emotions.

In the second place, even if he was indeed designed to have emotions, creating an algorithm to make them work correctly was almost impossible. Emotions are something that does not work according to logical reasons, and if he had they would likely be rather weird. He could have become "crazy", or dangerous. All considered, Bruce thought that maybe emotions could have their use, and sometimes he had wished for them, but most of the time he didn't miss them. Because one can hardly miss something he never had, and because missing something is quite difficult if you don't have the aforementioned emotions.

Thomas had kept experimenting after creating Bruce, about three years before. The only people he allowed to help him where Bruce and Alfred. He didn't trust others, and most of his experiments were rather... unethical. Bruce had morals, both programmed and learned, and he couldn't help but think that maybe using bodies of people who hadn't decided to donate them wasn't the best choice. Thomas always retorted that it wasn't like he was killing them, and that besides it wasn't like anyone was going to give a decent burial to a prostitute or a tramp.

Despite all of his efforts, the only thing Thomas had managed to give life to was Bruce, who wasn't even a living being in the true sense of the word.

Bruce was examining the feeds from the cameras Thomas had put in the cave to be sure that everything he did was recorded. If anything happened, he hadn't wanted it to be a unreplicable accident. It showed that Thomas had mixed two reagents and put them on a fire to accelerate the reaction. But then he had started taking notes on a piece of paper, and frowned before turning to a dead corpse lying on a table to examine it, forgetting of the substances on the Bunsen burner. The reaction had caused an explosion, which started the fire that killed Thomas.

Before dying, Thomas had "ordered" a couple other corpses to be brought to a secure location. It was easier to have others delivering them instead of searching them by himself, and after a few years the man had found people who just wanted to get paid and disappear, caring nothing about what Thomas did with the corpses. Being the owner of one of the biggest companies in the world, money had not been a problem for Thomas.

Bruce went to the deliver location a week after Thomas's death, which was the date the body should be delivered. It was night, and the area was isolated, but he had put on a black hoodie anyways. He had been standing there for ten minutes when a small truck pulled out of the road. Two men got out and walked towards Bruce.

«You're the one who ordered?» one of them said.

«Yes. I have your money» Bruce took out of his pocket 3000$ in cash, 1000$ for each body «This is the last... delivering I want»

«Whatever» the man said, grabbing the money and counting them. After he was sure he was paid correctly, he and the other went to the back of the truck and took out three wooden boxes, one after the other.

«It's all fresh, so they ain't stinking yet, but whatever you're doing with them do it quickly if you want to have them this way» one man said. They helped Bruce putting the boxes on a truck of his own, before driving away. Bruce got on the driver seat and went home.

When he was back in the cave, Bruce took out the three boxes and opened them. Thomas had had a refrigerator to put the bodies, but the machine had been destroyed and conserving the bodies was not what Bruce wanted. There was a pond in the cave, not very large, but quite deep. There was an area where the water was almost ten metres deep. Bruce thought he could burn the bodies, and then throw the remains in the pond with a weight attached to make them sink.

The first body had clearly been a prostitute, judging by the clothes and the fact that when Bruce moved her a couple condom fell out of her pocket. There was blood in her hair, and her skull was fractured. The second body was a man with a long, unkept beard and worn clothes. He wasn't wounded, but he was so thin Bruce suspected he had starved to death. Bruce put him over the prostitute, and went to open the third box. He broke the wood with the strength his steel muscles gave him, and when he did for a moment he was certain something had hit him in his chest, and the temperature around him had dropped. The strange feeling was soon gone, leaving Bruce wondering if his sensors had had a malfunctioning. He glanced down at the third body and froze for a second.

The man lying in the box was... unusual, at least. The suit looked expensive, if a bit worn, and he seemed to be far too healthy for a tramp. Bruce's color vision was far from perfect, he could only distinguish the brighter ones, and blood was basically black for him, but this man's blood was red, more intense than Bruce had ever seen. And there was a lot of blood, staining the man's suit and face. Bruce wasn't surprised. The man's cheeks were cut, his mouth spread in a grotesque Glasgow smile.

Bruce realized he had been staring at the body for a while without reason. He convinced himself to take it and deposit him near the others. He had chosen a place far from residuals of smoke and substances from the fire, to avoid risks. He covered the bodies in gasoline and threw a match on them. Two seconds later the pile was on fire, filling the cave with the smell of burning flesh. Bruce waited until there was nothing but bone left, before extinguishing the fire. He tied some bricks to every body, before throwing them in the pond. For some reason, he checked that what was left of the man with the Glasgow smile was tied well to the weights, that the ropes wouldn't come off.

As he walked away, Bruce thought he heard a faint laughter. He turned around, but there was no one there.

The next day, Bruce went in the cave once more to work on making the place safe once again. He had changed some air and cleaned a bit, but it was better to be sure that nothing dangerous could happen. Also, the cave could be useful someday.

Bruce froze in his steps as he walked out of the lift, his processor working on trying to find a reasonable explanation. A burnt body was just a couple metres from him, and the strange way the mouth was twisted told Bruce it was the man with the Glasgow smile, the one he was totally sure couldn't even get separated from the bricks he had tied him to.


	2. Chapter 2

**"Author's" note: **seems like I'm getting quick at updating things, only one week. It's a miracle for me. Anywho, enjoy this chapter. And, since I forgot to mention it in the previous chapter (bad Improbabile, bad) the title is a lyrics from Tarot's song "Ashes to the Stars". Please leave a review/comment/insult

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After a brief internal debate, Bruce had decided to not call Alfred. While the butler had returned to his usual professionalism, Bruce suspected that he had not yet fully recovered from Thomas' death and he didn't want to give any more things to worry about now. Instead, Bruce forced his processor to not think about how could the dead man be lying there rather than be still in the pond, and decided to examine him more closely. The fire had burnt the man beyond any recognition, the deep cuts on his face being the only things that gave away his identity. There were some small incisions were Bruce had tied him, and the water hadn't yet evaporated from the body. Which didn't mean anything, given the humidity in the cave he could have been in that point for a minute or for five hours.

Bruce picked up the body in his arms, feeling it was cold. So cold. More than a dead body should be. He walked to the pond, with the strong desire of just letting go of the man and go away. Fast. He didn't understand where this wish would come from, but he suppressed it and just tied some other weights to the body. He checked various times that the ropes were in perfect state, the knots tight and the weights more than enough to keep the man underwater even if he had been alive and struggling to come out. He walked into the water until it was about at the height of his waist and tossed the body were the water was deeper. After checking that it sank, he turned around and walked out. Just as he did so, he heard it again. The laughter of the previous night, only this time it was a bit louder.

The android walked to the computer he had put down in the cave a couple days before. He liked the idea that if he needed the cave, for whatever reasons, it would be ready with everything he could need. There were no reasons in particular for this, other than the fact that he was built to be a little paranoid. He would probably never understand why Thomas would have wanted that.

Bruce turned on the computer and accessed the camera feeds from the night before. Most cameras had not yet been replaced, so the only parts of the cave that were controlled were the various entrances to it. One camera showed Bruce enter the cave with the bodies at 00.57. Not long after, at 01.39, another feed had him walk to the lift and out of the cave. Just before he exited the cave, he turned around and watched, before turning back again and going out of the frame. That was the moment when he heard the laughter. He fast forwarded the feeds, seeing as nothing happened until 03.17, when something moved in front of the lift. He stopped and went back a couple minutes and waited to see what happened.

The feed was ruined, like the camera hadn't been working good. Which was strange, since it hadn't had any problems before. You could make out someone dragging something, the person walking with his back to the camera. He - the person looked like a man - stopped right in front of the lift, leaving there what he was moving. The body, of course, before casting some glances around and walking away. The feed returned to normality right after the man had gone away. Bruce searched on all the other feeds, and found nothing else about this man. Nothing showed when or where he got in the cave, not when he got out. If he got out. Bruce had heard the laughter when he was putting the body back in the pond. He hadn't seen anyone, but it was possible that the man was hiding somewhere and the laughter had just echoed through the cave.

Bruce went through all the feeds again, until he stopped at this morning's. There it was again. The feed suddenly went bad, and he could see something moving. The man again. He was on the side, so Bruce couldn't see very well what he was doing. But from the angle of the camera, the man had been standing right behind him, before walking away again. Bruce looked at the time of the feed. The man had been there from 09.44 to 09.51. Bruce had sat at the computer at 09.13 and now it was 10.07. He straightened back in his chair and turned around. To greet him, there was again the body. Lying right there, water still dripping from its sides. His hearing was better than a human's, how had he not heard the man's footsteps, or the sound of the body being carried?

Bruce put the camera that showed the area near him on a new window, keeping it under control. At the same time, he went back to the man's first appearance. For a moment, he had been turned right to the camera. Bruce stopped there and zoomed on he man. The feed was ruined and quality not very high, so it was hard to make out any detail. But Bruce was sure there was something strange about this. He stared at the image for a couple seconds, then he realized. The feed was in black and white, and given his low color reception Bruce hadn't thought about it. But now that he remembered, he couldn't help but wonder how was it possible that there were clearly red zones on the man's face, specifically his mouth.

Bruce blinked. Maybe it was an error in his vision receptors. He opened a new program, one that had a color recognizer. He ran it and it confirmed that there was indeed a red zone on the image. Not only that, the hair was of a shade of green and the clothes slightly purple, too faint for Bruce to recognize them as different from shades of grey but they were. He went back to the picture, trying to make out any detail of the man's face. Nothing, other than the red on his mouth and cheeks-

Bruce froze. It couldn't be. Yet, the man looked exactly like the body. Bruce ran some other programs, and noticed that the man's height and proportions were about the same of the body, and now that he thought about it, the hair and the clothes looked kind of similar too.

Bruce turned off the computer, not before sending all the feeds to the one in his room. He rose from the chair and turned. The body was still there, and the cuts looked like some kind of mock-smile. Bruce walked around it, keeping it always in his sight. He took a step back and a wave cold rushed through him, like the temperature had suddenly dropped many degrees. All of his body felt like he was buried in ice, and, to his surprise, so did his left hand, the one he still had not repaired properly and hence had no sensibility whatsoever to the outside temperature. He turned around and backed a few steps, fleeing from the unexpected sensation, and for a second he thought he had seen someone standing there, right where he had been before, someone with a bright red smile on his face. But it was gone in the space of a second. And then there was the laughter- the same from before, only louder and instead of lasting only a few seconds, it went on and on. It sounded like there was some kind of gurgling together with the laughter, like whoever was laughing had some water in the back of his throat. Or maybe some blood. Like he was choking on it.

Bruce couldn't feel anything, least of all fear, but he could swear that the cold was accompanied by a strange sensation that stayed and made him run out of the cave. Alfred probably heard the noise and reached Bruce in a matter of minutes.

«Master Bruce?» he asked. Bruce turned towards him and saw that the man had an overly worried look on his face, Alfred, that was a master in hiding emotions. Bruce turned around to the mirror in the room, seeing his mouth open and his eyes wider than he ever had in his "life". He didn't remember moving his face in that expression.

Bruce and Alfred were sitting in the kitchen. Alfred had made some tea - only for himself, since Bruce didn't have a digestive system. Bruce had told the butler what had happened in the cave, all his reservations about Alfred's emotional state thrown out of the proverbial window. When he finished his narration, the butler was carefully sipping his hot tea, and to everyone he would have been the picture of tranquility - but Bruce knew better, he saw the microscopic changes on Alfred's face that gave away the butler's confusion and worry.

«What do you think?» Bruce asked, his processor struggling desperately to find an explanation for what had happened.

«The first thing that comes to my mind would be that this mysterious man you saw is a ghost, but I don't think that's the answer you are looking for» Alfred took another sip from his cup.

«Ghosts aren't real» Bruce responded.

«I know, sir, but I can't think about any possible theory for what happened in the cave, so I'm going with the impossible ones» Alfred tilted his head almost imperceptibly «You should go to sleep, sir»

«Why?» Bruce asked. He couldn't technically sleep, not in the way living beings did, but he could go into a stand-by mode, in case his processor needed to slow down or, in a couple occasions, he had to do an update of his program.

«Because you are hyperventilating, which is, if I remember correctly, the way you act when your processor is overheating» Bruce looked down at his chest. Right. He had an automatic mechanism that resembled breathing, that he needed both to keep up appearances of humanity and to avoid overheating of his processor. Right now, this mechanism was faster than it usually was, meaning he should slow down his processor as much as he could.

«Ok then. Wake me in a couple hours, I need to think about this... whatever this is» Bruce muttered, in a tone that basically screamed "I'm-doing-this-only-to-make-you-stop-complaining" and went to his room.

He laid on the bed, and while he really should get some sleep, he didn't want to. There had to be some logical explanation for that man, one that didn't involve the supernatural. True, he was programmed to have an open mind about what could and could not happen, but ghosts? It just wasn't possible. Or yes?

A whirring coming from his chest reminded Bruce of why he was on the bed. The fans didn't turn on unless his processor was getting really too warm, and the android could definitely feel the heat radiating from his core. He closed his eyes and activated the stand-by sequence.

«Master Bruce?» Bruce was woken by a gentle hand on his shoulder.

«What time is it Alfred?» he groaned.

«It's almost three in the afternoon. I let you sleep a bit more than you asked me to, I hope you're well rested» Bruce didn't answer. He had decided to go out of stand-by as soon as his processor cooled down to an acceptable temperature for half an hour or so, and apparently the two hours he had told Alfred weren't enough. He got up and was reminded of why he didn't like to go into stand-by, or more precisely why he didn't like getting out of it earlier than necessary. He felt his program kicking in slowly, and his head hurt. Not much, which meant he was probably about to wake up anyway, but getting out of stand-by too early was like sleeping too little for a human. Awful.

«Give me a minute» Bruce said, sitting back on the bed. He couldn't see it, but he had the distinct impression that Alfred was smirking.

«As you wish sir» the butler replied. Bruce stayed still for a bit more than a minute, until he could finally think properly.

«So, did you have any more ideas while I was sleeping?» he asked, turning his head to face Alfred.

«If you are referring to the new occupant of the cave, I've watched the camera feeds and the ghost theory is still the only one I can think of» the butler said. Bruce nodded.

«Seems like I'll have to get used to this idea until we find out who exactly that man is» he commented. He went to his computer and opened the folder where he had saved the cameras feeds. He watched them again, before connecting to the cameras to control if the mysterious man had done anything else in the meantime. At 12.32, one of the camera went off. Two minutes later, another one followed, and so on until at 12.59 only the camera in front of the lift was working. Nothing happened there, only one time there were some disturbances and Bruce saw a vague red spot moving in the background, but that was it.

«The cameras in the cave are the only ones not working, all the other in the house are in perfect conditions» Alfred said.

«Looks like I'll have to repair those soon. I want to know as much as I can about our so-called ghost whereabouts» Bruce still didn't believe the whole ghost thing, but it was better to go with it until he understood who or what the man really was. He didn't want his processor to overheat again while thinking about him.

In a matter of twenty minutes Bruce was back in the cave. He had brought all the necessary tools to repair the cameras, plus an old gun he had found. He wasn't planning on using it, but he wanted to be safe, just in case the man wanted to harm him and his strength wasn't enough to defend himself. Which he doubted, since he literally had muscles of steel, between other materials.

The burnt body was still where Bruce had last seen it. He eyed it for a moment, before glancing around to check if the man was around. He didn't see anything. He walked into the cave, listening carefully and looking around. He didn't want to be taken by surprise. He thought he heard a faint chuckle once, but it was just a false alarm.

When Bruce found the first of the cameras, he understood his kit of tools was going to be totally useless. It wasn't that the camera lens was broken, or a wire had been cut, rather the thing had literally exploded. Bruce climbed on the cave wall and took down the remains of the object.

After a quick control, it resulted that all the cameras were in the same conditions. Bruce went back to the area near the lift and sat at the table. The remains of the cameras showed that it hadn't been the objects that exploded, rather some little explosion that were started right on them.

Bruce leaned back in his chair. There were substances that could cause an explosion in the manor, of course, but all the remaining chemicals in the cave had been taken out right after the fire. So either this man came here with a stock of explosives, or he had found them in the manor. Bruce turned on the computer and checked multiple times all the feeds from the cameras placed anywhere near the chemicals in the manor.

One of the cameras had started malfunctioning less than half an hour before the first explosion, and when it started working again some of the boxes in the room were misplaced. Bruce was certain that he saw a red spot moving around in that lapse of time. So this man could also go in and out of the manor and the cave whenever he wanted to. Bruce didn't like this knowledge. Not at all. He had to understand how could someone move out of the cave without any of the at the time still functioning cameras recording him and go in that specifically room of the manor still without appearing on any of the feeds. Bruce had to admit, the ghost theory seemed to be the only one that could work.

His thoughts were interrupted by a laughter behind himself. Bruce spinned around the chair and came face-to-face with the occupant of the cave. The man was standing with his shoulders slumped down, staring straight at Bruce while he laughed. Bruce always had problems understanding exactly what it meant when people said that the eyes are the mirror of the soul, or things like that. For him, eyes were eyes, they could express emotions by getting wider or by the level of dilatation of the pupils, but he never saw how eyes could be happy or sad. But this man's eyes, even Bruce saw that they were empty. Two black holes, with nothing behind them. Bruce was fairly certain that this was what a madman's eyes are like. The man tilted his head to one side, and blood started dripping from the Glasgow smile to the ground.

Even if the fact that someone with such wounds could be standing there laughing without problems hadn't been enough for Bruce to have doubts about this man's humanity, the man was the exact copy of how the burnt corpse on the ground had looked like. From the suit to the hair and the physique, and of course the wounds. Deep gashes that made the man's mouth hang open, revealing teeth and tongue. The blood was still flowing, dripping in the man's throat and making him choke on it. It had to be extremely painful, yet he was laughing. Hysteria, maybe? No, Bruce was sure it was something else.

The man took a step toward Bruce and the android stand and took out the gun from his trousers. He shot the man, but the bullet seemed to just pass through him and the man started laughing even more.

«Who are you?» Bruce asked. No answer but maniacal laughter. The man stopped at less than a metre from Bruce. He was a bit shorter, and had to tilt up his head to look him in the eyes. Bruce sustained his gaze, and they stayed like that for a second, before the man made a strange, choked sound and burst forward and literally into Bruce. The android froze, not only for the cold that assaulted him. He wanted to run, run far from here, leave this thing behind, he didn't know why he just couldn't stand the thought of being here, with this man. He let out a strangled shout and stumbled forward, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the man. He tripped over and fell.

Bruce turned around, still on the ground, to look at the man- the ghost, no human being was like that, no living human could possibly walk around for two days with those wounds without dying from blood loss. The ghost had turned to look at him and he was laughing again, more than before. The sound sent strange shivers down Bruce's spine, but the feeling he had had when he touched the ghost was vanished. He still wanted to run, and maybe scream, but these desires where getting less strong by the second.

The man was walking towards Bruce once again, and he got up as fast as he could, taking a step back. He ran to the lift and exited the cave. What had that sensation been? It was horrible, and he had no wish to feel it again anytime soon. He stepped out of the lift and in the small studio. Alfred was reading the newspaper in the room, clearly waiting for Bruce's return.

«Ghost. Definitely a ghost» Bruce said.

«How can you be so sure, Master Bruce? You were rather skeptical before» the butler asked, putting down the newspaper and focusing his attention on Bruce. Bruce explained him.

«So, I suppose I'll have to do some research on how to handle having a ghost haunting your home» Bruce concluded.

«I'm more worried about the feeling you had when you touched him» Alfred mused.

«Why?»

«On your description, I would say you were scared» Bruce blinked.

«Alfred, I can't be scared» he replied.

«And ghost aren't real, sir»


End file.
